Turning the OLPC Into a Hacker’s Toolkit - Give One, Get Owned, Part 2

In Part 2 of his look at the OLPC’s XO, Seth Fogie steers beyond the enhancements outlined in Part 1. Here are the steps to take for turning that innocent-looking device into a hacker’s toolkit. You’ll see how to install, set up, and use the device to own remote devices on the network. Who would have thought that the OLPC's goal of educating children in developing countries could empower them to become hackers?

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The OLPC project's XO is a cute little green computer that was designed
for extreme conditions and novice users. But don't let its appearance
deceive you. What appears to be a solution meant to provide an educational
stimulus to the children in a third world country might just be so much more.

In Part 1, we illustrated how to tweak the OLPC into a personalized machine
that provides a solid foundation for all your hacking dreams. With that
accomplished, we will now go one huge step further and turn that passive XO into
a true Lean Green Hacking Machine.

Building a Basic Hacker Toolkit

The following series of steps will help you convert your plain old boring
OLPC into a device with the potential to own the world. Although we can assure
you that the programs we'll mention are used by hackers and crackers
worldwide, we won't be providing the required information you'll need
to effectively use these programs. So, we highly recommend that you look to
external sources (if needed) to expand your knowledge base to fully understand
the impact that the highlighted programs can have on the networks and systems
they are used against.

The first thing we need to do is install the core suite of tools that
traditionally make up a hacker's toolkit, taking away all shreds of
remaining innocence from your XO. When you're done with this section, your
OLPC will contain enough tools to take on most any network!

Here are the easy-to-install yet essential tools that you can quickly get up
and running on the XO, and instructions for installing them.

Netcat. Netcat is the hacker's Swiss Army knife of tools. In
the right hands, it can do scanning, probing, testing, tunneling, and much more.
To install, just type yum install nc.

nmap. The first choice for network mapping. Everyone uses nmap.
Even Trinity from The Matrix uses it. You need to use it. To install,
just type yum install nmap.

Zenmap. Though nmap can be a great tool, knowing all those flags
and correctly typing them in can be annoying. To simplify things, you need
Zenmap, the GUI interface for nmap! To install, type wget
http://download.insecure.org/nmap/dist/zenmap-4.53-1.noarch.rpm
at a shell prompt as root. Then install the file with the command rpm
–iv zenmap*rpm.

Nikto. Nikto is a web application vulnerability scanner. It
admittedly does lead to numerous false positives, but using this tool against a
website can save a lot of manual testing and probing. To install, just type
yum install nikto.